(In body and as attachment--it's long for a blog, I know.)
Mad He Is Not
So claims the protagonist, for he dares not “expect nor solicit” the reader to believe his story. Of course it is just this initial proclamation that belies his true state. The character goes on to say that although his “senses reject their own evidence,” he does “not dream” either. In what is perhaps one of the first pieces of literature to prefigure the oncoming field of psychology, specifically abnormal psychology, Poe’s short story The Black Cat delivers unto the world a fiend, a sociopath of the first order, a man obsessed—with his sanity, with his nature, with evil, and, of course, with a particular bête noire, more demon than animal.
Dissociation and sociopathy are two key psychological traits Poe grants his narrator; both in the admission by the latter of his inability to find causation in the series of events that have unfolded, and the increasing lack of empathy he displays towards those around him (feline and otherwise: namely, his wife). The condemned man writes his tale, he argues, hoping for “some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than [his] own, which will perceive…nothing more than ordinary succession of very natural cause and effects.” The implication being that the he himself, suffering an acute dissociation—a disconnection from reality—cannot. Apparently the logic and reason that every human being is endowed with—at least according to the previous era’s Enlightenment thinkers and Poe’s contemporary Utilitarians—has escaped the grasp of this poor fellow. Perhaps Poe was taking exception to this rigid structure and design of human consciousness, as presented by his intellectual forbearers. Further, he could be suggesting that the way in which traumatic experiences and their cascading emotions can overcome and overwhelm a “normal” psychological disposition.
In the story, the catalyst of the anti-hero’s turn towards the dark side is the “Fiend Intemperance;” i.e., drinking alcohol. This darker world he moves in is one without reason, logic or order; but, also, one removed from joy and the lacking of a connectedness to others. In the soon to be common nomenclature of the 20th century: a sociopath. First, he becomes abusive to his previously beloved animals. (This activity now being a tell-tale—no pun intended—sign of a child or adolescent predisposed to sociopathic behavior, and crucial indicator within the serial-killer “profile.”) Next, to his wife he “offered her personal violence.” This act marks the transition from troubled alcoholic to the depraved indifference of a killer. It is soon after he fixates his hatred and retribution upon the cat, Pluto. For what is it to pluck the eye of a cat in return for a superficial wound inflicted by “the beast,” if the beating of a spouse is no cause for compunction?
Again in rebuke to the Enlightenment, the notions of free will and of the intellect over physicality are questioned to the extent that external forces affect the actions and thoughts of an individual (or of the group, as well, but not of purpose here). The man in the story, while over a hundred years ahead of his time in labeling alcoholism as a disease, blames his actions and disposition on his drinking; another psychological defect: blame avoidance. It should be no surprise then that Poe was living and writing in the era of early communist and socialist thinkers, some of their theories being dependent on the idea of structuralism—where humanity is shaped by the structures within which it lives, vices included.
Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? …It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.
Finally the true offending brute is revealed, and it is not the cat, but himself. He is both the source and the focus of the violence. Self-destruction, self-immolation, in a word, one German word: selbstzerstörung, or self-destruction. If “perpetual inclination [is] to violate that which is Law,” what more than the inborn law of self-preservation is there to be broken? If life is a gift granted to the world, then what better form of refutation, of perverseness.
It is in this frame of mind the protagonist hangs his cat from the tree in the yard thusly. Here, Poe takes on the religious language of sin and damnation. As shown above, he “hung it because [he] knew that in doing so [he] was committing a sin.” And consequently, “jeopardize [his] immortal soul…even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of…God.” An intentional transgression plays out bringing forth not only self-destruction but self-damnation. Even Adam and Eve knew not their fate for their own act of willful defiance, yet this man clamors for retribution still.
Such is found briskly, in a more modern phrase, Western-worded and Eastern-conceptualized: instant-karma. The couple’s house is set aflame the very same evening of the cat’s demise. However, only after this immolation, the dead cat—in his mind, anyway—to blame, does the villain’s true obsession begin. He confesses: “My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforth to despair.” But it was not a lonely despair; the man soon finds another cynosure for his perverseness—a new feline descends upon the scene.
Evil thoughts became my sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to a hatred of all mankind…a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas, was the most usual…of sufferers.
Indeed, suffer she does. In the following paragraph, while defending the cat from attack, she is dispatched by the swing of an axe to the head, with the haste of “some household errand.” Most telling is that from that point forward the wife is never again mentioned with use of a pronoun, indicating a person. True to form, in the mind of a sociopath, she is only referred to as “the body” or “the corpse” or, even, simply “it.” With as much feeling as one would have for pieces of meat, he ponders “[m]any projects” so as to conceal his crime, such as “cutting the corpse into minute fragments” (18). Eventually, the murderer having “wall[ed] it up in the cellar,” remarks at how well he is able to sleep “even with the burden of murder in my soul.” This doesn’t sound like much of a burden at all.
Although he waxes secure in his crime hidden and the cat now apparently run away, this over confidence betrays his inner self-destructive desire. With great bravado does the monster welcome inspection of his concealment by the police, in the end undone by the sound of a cat from behind the cellar wall. Two options present themselves for reflection. First, if truly there were a cat, how did a man, even in a great hurry, not see or hear the animal while the building of the wall was in progress? And then the beast waited days and many opportunities to speak up? No, this cat, as was the first one to set the house aflame after being strung up in the yard, is nothing more than the manifestation of the narrator’s last sociopathic obsession: to be caught and punished. Selbstzerstörung never felt so good.
Dissociation and sociopathy are two key psychological traits Poe grants his narrator; both in the admission by the latter of his inability to find causation in the series of events that have unfolded, and the increasing lack of empathy he displays towards those around him (feline and otherwise: namely, his wife). The condemned man writes his tale, he argues, hoping for “some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than [his] own, which will perceive…nothing more than ordinary succession of very natural cause and effects.” The implication being that the he himself, suffering an acute dissociation—a disconnection from reality—cannot. Apparently the logic and reason that every human being is endowed with—at least according to the previous era’s Enlightenment thinkers and Poe’s contemporary Utilitarians—has escaped the grasp of this poor fellow. Perhaps Poe was taking exception to this rigid structure and design of human consciousness, as presented by his intellectual forbearers. Further, he could be suggesting that the way in which traumatic experiences and their cascading emotions can overcome and overwhelm a “normal” psychological disposition.
In the story, the catalyst of the anti-hero’s turn towards the dark side is the “Fiend Intemperance;” i.e., drinking alcohol. This darker world he moves in is one without reason, logic or order; but, also, one removed from joy and the lacking of a connectedness to others. In the soon to be common nomenclature of the 20th century: a sociopath. First, he becomes abusive to his previously beloved animals. (This activity now being a tell-tale—no pun intended—sign of a child or adolescent predisposed to sociopathic behavior, and crucial indicator within the serial-killer “profile.”) Next, to his wife he “offered her personal violence.” This act marks the transition from troubled alcoholic to the depraved indifference of a killer. It is soon after he fixates his hatred and retribution upon the cat, Pluto. For what is it to pluck the eye of a cat in return for a superficial wound inflicted by “the beast,” if the beating of a spouse is no cause for compunction?
Again in rebuke to the Enlightenment, the notions of free will and of the intellect over physicality are questioned to the extent that external forces affect the actions and thoughts of an individual (or of the group, as well, but not of purpose here). The man in the story, while over a hundred years ahead of his time in labeling alcoholism as a disease, blames his actions and disposition on his drinking; another psychological defect: blame avoidance. It should be no surprise then that Poe was living and writing in the era of early communist and socialist thinkers, some of their theories being dependent on the idea of structuralism—where humanity is shaped by the structures within which it lives, vices included.
Perverse He Is
Only when a man cares for nothing, is he free to do anything.
After dear Pluto regains a sense of normalcy, granted an eye sort, the scoundrel of man truly begins to take shape. To be expected even at this point, while he had initially felt some “remorse” at his injurious act, his “soul remained untouched,” and the man is left with a feeling of “irritation” about the animal. Here Poe lays down one last coat of paint that will color and mask the malefactor’s psyche, his “final and irrevocable overthrow.” An admitted “spirit of PERVERSNESS” is to become his ultimate obsession. What Poe means by “perverseness” goes beyond mere recalcitrance or even abnormality, and still further than immorality. An obsessive malevolence draws nearer the magnitude and depravity of which the man is endowed.Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? …It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.
Finally the true offending brute is revealed, and it is not the cat, but himself. He is both the source and the focus of the violence. Self-destruction, self-immolation, in a word, one German word: selbstzerstörung, or self-destruction. If “perpetual inclination [is] to violate that which is Law,” what more than the inborn law of self-preservation is there to be broken? If life is a gift granted to the world, then what better form of refutation, of perverseness.
It is in this frame of mind the protagonist hangs his cat from the tree in the yard thusly. Here, Poe takes on the religious language of sin and damnation. As shown above, he “hung it because [he] knew that in doing so [he] was committing a sin.” And consequently, “jeopardize [his] immortal soul…even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of…God.” An intentional transgression plays out bringing forth not only self-destruction but self-damnation. Even Adam and Eve knew not their fate for their own act of willful defiance, yet this man clamors for retribution still.
Such is found briskly, in a more modern phrase, Western-worded and Eastern-conceptualized: instant-karma. The couple’s house is set aflame the very same evening of the cat’s demise. However, only after this immolation, the dead cat—in his mind, anyway—to blame, does the villain’s true obsession begin. He confesses: “My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforth to despair.” But it was not a lonely despair; the man soon finds another cynosure for his perverseness—a new feline descends upon the scene.
She Fell Bodily
Predictably enough, by the by our man comes to loathe the new animal as much as the first, and again he is possessed from within. The cycle begins again.Evil thoughts became my sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to a hatred of all mankind…a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas, was the most usual…of sufferers.
Indeed, suffer she does. In the following paragraph, while defending the cat from attack, she is dispatched by the swing of an axe to the head, with the haste of “some household errand.” Most telling is that from that point forward the wife is never again mentioned with use of a pronoun, indicating a person. True to form, in the mind of a sociopath, she is only referred to as “the body” or “the corpse” or, even, simply “it.” With as much feeling as one would have for pieces of meat, he ponders “[m]any projects” so as to conceal his crime, such as “cutting the corpse into minute fragments” (18). Eventually, the murderer having “wall[ed] it up in the cellar,” remarks at how well he is able to sleep “even with the burden of murder in my soul.” This doesn’t sound like much of a burden at all.
Although he waxes secure in his crime hidden and the cat now apparently run away, this over confidence betrays his inner self-destructive desire. With great bravado does the monster welcome inspection of his concealment by the police, in the end undone by the sound of a cat from behind the cellar wall. Two options present themselves for reflection. First, if truly there were a cat, how did a man, even in a great hurry, not see or hear the animal while the building of the wall was in progress? And then the beast waited days and many opportunities to speak up? No, this cat, as was the first one to set the house aflame after being strung up in the yard, is nothing more than the manifestation of the narrator’s last sociopathic obsession: to be caught and punished. Selbstzerstörung never felt so good.
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